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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately not the case. Ownership of your property gives you an effective fractional ownership interest in your local radius through zoning and community governance. No amount of state law is going to change that. You can keep fighting the issue (and you might have some traction in a decade or two) or move somewhere more accommodating.

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Yeah, but you don't own that other property. Other people do, and they should be able to do as they please with it, so long as it meets zoning regulations.

I don't think a concept of a fractional ownership exists because, well, it's not yours.

If you really want some guarantee that your immediate radius will meet some sort of standards, it sounds like you'd want to be part of an HOA. I personally would never want to be part of one (who likes being told what to do?) but they could help protect property values from that one neighbor who could be a problem.

Neighborhoods and communities are real things. Noise, dogs, trees, etc. don't respect property lines or zoning regulations. That's the sense in which fractional ownership exists: when you are my neighbor, you necessarily invade my space. But good neighbors look out for each other.

"Everyone should maximize the income from their property up to the limit of law" is a recipe for for having no neighborhoods or communities. It's the usual fallacy of treating people as fungible commodities.

HOAs are terrible, they are inevitably staffed with busybodies. We can agree on that!

I think that’s pretense. Homeowners use zoning primarily to protect property values, not build up communities. The suburb where I live now is incredibly neighborly. There’s also a bar within walking distance and a little corner store. Part of the reason is that lots are tiny (about 1/12 of an acre) and there are few cul de sacs so you actually see people walking their dogs, etc. Today, parking, lot size, traffic management, and other regulations would make it illegal to build something like our neighborhood. The minimum lot size is like 1/4 of an acre in our county! You’re basically obligated to build suburban hellscapes where you can’t even go to a neighbor’s house without getting in a car.

Zoning is not a property right in California Law, and community governance is not purchased through home ownership. Tenants and "live in owners" have the same amounts of votes in the system, 1. What you are describing, the enfranchisement of voters in a political system through land ownership is actually feudalism.

> Zoning is not a property right in California Law

It certainly is in San Francisco at least. Well, probably not literally zoning, but regulations around it make the home owners in an area de facto owners of it in many ways.

I see the current housing crisis as a direct result of this.

And for the betterment of society, we should take away some of that power. It's clearly being abused.

You will never have as much power as those property owners without a time machine to 30-40 years ago, and in the unlikely event you become a property owner, it’s against your interests to do anything that devalues your investment (ie increasing supply).

You’re asking rational actors to make irrational decisions. The results are what you’d expect.

Increasing supply doesn't necessarily devalue your investment. When the large single family mansions on 5th Ave in Manhattan were slowly replaced by skyscrapers, the value of their land went up.

That would be unthinkable today though.

state law overrides local law. These battles are not going to be won by exclusionary wealthy communities willingly opening the gates, its going to be done by the state blowing the gates open. See the past year, bills like SB167 (Ability to sue for units denied at planning commision that are zoning/code compliant)sb 166 (making sure cities are up to date with their RHNA targets)and SB35 (bypassing local planning for zoning compliant projects).

It will take years, if not longer, for any challenges to work their way through the courts. By then, the next economic event will occur, driving out non-owners in the Bay Area.

As I mention in a sibling comment, you might see changes in a decade or two, but no sooner.

I am not opposed to efforts related to increasing the housing supply (although I do think it’s a fool’s errand in the Bay Area as demand is insatiable due to the tech industry and foreign money seeking a safe asset store), I’m just describing the uphill climb these endeavors face. It’s hard to fiddle with a core component of the economy (property law).

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